


In Spring

by rednightmare



Series: Below the Storm [2]
Category: Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Class Differences, Coming of Age, Emotional Roller Coaster, F/M, Grief, Jealousy, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romantic Friendship, Sexual Content, angst with an uplifting ending, medievalism, parental abandonment/neglect, trauma & recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 17:13:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16179545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: Spring cannot last forever. Eventually, he will grow up.An exploration of the end of Lord Capon’s extended adolescence, and the animals left unhunted. Vignettes, one-shot.





	In Spring

**Author's Note:**

> **SERIES ORDER** : _In Spring_ draws heavily from the characterization in _A Strange Hunt_ —it essentially picks up Hans’s development arc where the other left off—but it can be read free-standing. I strongly recommend catching at least the second chapter of [A STRANGE HUNT](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13982742/chapters/32543415#workskin) first, though. A note for minor timeline extensions and sensibility’s-sake siege chronology tweaks, because historical fiction is fiction.
> 
>  **WARNINGS** : There’s some haute lit sex in this; it’s overt, but not porny. Battlefield violence is primarily located in the siege sections, though descriptions aren’t especially gruesome. Alcoholism is on stage here, but the scenes of actual alcohol abuse are less focal/intense than in _A Strange Hunt_. Also, **SPOILERS AHOY.**
> 
>  **HISTORICAL TIDBIT** : As one last prelude, a quick historical note on medieval adolescentia may be useful. The medieval age of majority was rarely a cut-and-dried legal line—and was, popular TV depictions to the contrary, often declared later than today’s legal standard (and usually demarcated by marriage and entitlements in the early-to-mid twenties). Hence, when we dub a medieval character “adolescent/underage” we aren’t saying they’re certainly under-eighteen as we would today—we’re placing them in this flexible stage of adolescentia, after definitively leaving medieval childhood but before fulfilling the specific eligibility requirements attached to their role in feudal society. tl;dr: In medieval European society, twenty-somethings were by-and-large still considered ignorant young things, much as they are thought of today.

In springtime, the forest flowers with bones.

Spring in Rattay is much like any other spring. Morning mist gathers on Pirkstein’s window glass, orange kittens are born in hay sheds, bitterns fish perch from the creeks. Little deer feel new and not yet fat, and the hardened ground pares back to expose winter’s carcasses. Hans, seeking newness, flees the sunbleached brick of his future, and hunts the pine woods for virgin bones.

 _Panem et circenses,_ he says. For bread and circuses, he says. He grabs an armful of spears and says _mount up!_

Bones are not his stated quarry, of course. The warm-blooded young lord announces that the weather is mild, the snowfall is over, and he should like to embark at dawn on his first boar hunt of the season. Hanush is visiting his one-dozen children in Uzhitz, and so there is no one to tell him no. He is keen to see the insides of things. He trots out his favorite mare under the first twitch of pink cloud, and the clip-clop of gray courser wakes dozing farm hounds as hooves strike drawbridge, thistles, dewy stone.

March is the first month for bones. But the ground is still too frozen to yield them, and in April, the topsoil yet reeks of flesh. It is May sun that finally dries the dirt and gently roasts the marrow clean. He can spot the large ones from horseback: a cow’s hip on the low fields, a foal’s calfbone carried by wolves into a copse below Neuhof, the fragile arm of a crow.

 _Revenge,_ he says. _For the last spring._ _Find a mean old fucker,_ he says, pantomiming a shot, imagining the arc of the javelin. _And stick him into the ground._

He does not hunt alone. Since the Cumans cut the throat of his sporting coat and killed his dogs, Bernard will not allow it, and this rule Hans finds he truly has no desire to disobey. With the smell of raw bitchflesh turning the stomach of his dreams and his neck squeezed by the ghost-paws of captivity he will never quite forget, Lord Capon does not mind a little company. The hands of men have robbed his heart of its belief in aloneness among trees.

His first find of the season is big. A deer must have fallen into a poacher’s pit, where it snapped an ankle and could not climb out; its corpse is left standing, front legs outflung over the lip of the hole, snarled in roots. Rot still clings to its ribs and hindquarters. But the skull is barren white, a trophy upon a precarious ladder of vertebrae. He feels kinship with it. Sorry for it, at least, and though he is too late to help, grabs the antlers to see if he can tug it the rest of the way out.

The deerspine detaches at the shoulders. Its bone-tail is bedraggled and smells of bad meat, so he steps on it until the head cracks free of the stem. The mandible falls with a thump at his feet. A whole bone, castaway from the harbor. He settles the surviving half-skull upon his own head like a crown.

 _“Look, Henry!”_ he cries, bursting through chokeberry bushes with antlers and two sets of top teeth. _“I’m the Prince of the Forest!”_

“You’re a fucking loony, is what you are,” Henry disagrees from his rock by the hunting camp, waggling his skinning knife like a finger point toward the woods. “Put that back where you found it.”

Bernard—with whom Hal, poor lad, had got off on the wrong foot and never recovered—doubts a peasant-soldier can defend Sir Hans against anything more tenacious than a honeybee, but the old man has half as many teeth as they say. He is far too soft on his dead master’s son and won’t deny him anything. Besides, Lord Capon reasons, the more he teaches Henry, the samer creature they become.

“Buzzard. Did you even try to shoot something? Or did you spend all afternoon picking at corpses?” Hal eyes his own catch of spring hares, three skinny bucks strung in a row. They are neat and clean of oozing, for Hans has taught him to fire from higher ground, where you can see clearly between the brambles. He’s taught him how to walk softly on twigs and ride horseback through dense aspens, and how to keep his head above water, and how to hold a bow, too. He feels more boy’s ownership over his pupil than teacher’s pride.

“Rebel,” Hans protests, stepping up from the packed dirt onto a seat improvised from a tree stump. There—from higher ground—he surveys his domicile. Henry rolls his eyes and goes back to sharpening the knife. “Who are you to boss royalty, fool?”

“I’m the one who’s not wearing a musty skull on my head like some kind of Christmas wreath. Get rid of that thing.”

“The word you are looking for, simpleton—” He hops his way around the cold firepit, one stump to the next—wobbling, for it is difficult—looking like a careful shoregirl trying not to wet her dress in the creek. Below deerbone, under the exposed teeth, he can see hawthorn snarling everywhichway, and the smell is quite barbarian. He cannot see any curtain wall or castle tower or tamed field of wheat. He feels as though his gray eyes have gone sap green. He feels as though he is an ancient thing made young forever. “—is _laurel_.”

“The word I’m looking for,” Henry reavows, “is _loony_.”

It’s true; a blacksmith makes for a laughable soldier. But Hans brings him along all the same, for it can’t hurt, and because in these last seasons of springtime, his life has become an anxious wait until the next hour he is able to run off and teach something new to his friend.

He has taught him many other things, too. How to speak to a courtier and how to wear a collared shirt. How to jump forward without losing your stride and how to hit someone so they won’t rightaway stand up again. How to brush the curl of hair on his horse’s hip and how to refuse a duel. How to walk on a twisted ankle, how to kiss a woman between the legs, how to eat berries from the woods without killing yourself, how to cut a man’s throat on a field of war if no one else is around to do it for you. How to see underwater. How to read a road map and how to tell where he is by looking at the stars.

“What do _you_ want to do, then,” Lord Capon posits, not caring for the answer or the future. “Do you want to make a fucking legend? Want to take a bear’s head to hang over the shitter? Dance with the witches, father some wildlings? Should we go to sleep early and hunt down a Bohemian lion?”

“Are we not going back to the city tomorrow?”

“Why?”

“Why? Won’t Sir Hanush wonder where you are?” Henry, whose eyes are a true and real green, rests his knife and his whetstone. Hans pushes his crown up with a finger to see the blacksmith’s face though he already knows just what it looks like. Henry is a commoner, and so worries over tomorrows. He cannot be content with whenevers and somedays. He is always asking _why_ and _when_ and _for how long_.

“Probably,” the young lord agrees, nearly stumbling from his balancing game on a difficult leap. “I’m sure he’ll assume I’ve gone on a rollicking drunken cavalcade through the woods. I’m known to do that, you see.”

“You don’t think he’ll worry something untoward’s happened to you?”

“Worry? No, he’ll be certain of it. I can hear him beargrowling now. ‘ _Radzig! Your big-eared whelp is off in yon wilds drilling my nephew over a fucking stump again!’”_

“Don’t be vulgar.”

_“‘Are you quite sure, Hanush? Something of a hasty presumption on your part, isn’t it? It seems equally possible—even probable—that your nephew is doing the drilling.’”_

“Doesn’t even sound like him,” Henry lies. He takes his knife back to the sharpening stone.

Hans, wearing his stag crown proudly, stands with one boot each on a cut tree to toss his arms high in the air. “Drop your balls, you hen! What will Uncle do—send me to bed without supper? Your lord and master is sleeping in _my_ castle tower, for Christ’s sake.”

 “Yes, but I have responsibilities, too.” Henry sounds childish in his diligence, though he is still the responsible child.

“Oh, fine, all right. If you’re scared Bernard’s going to take a cane to your rear for dereliction of duty, we’ll go back.”

The blacksmith looks at him with a skeptic’s face that makes Hans feel the dimples in his own. Then he asks as he has asked many times: “And when will that happen?”

In the morning, Hans says. He knows the time is not just now.

When he has made it all the way around, Lord Capon—never one to be interrupted at his games—attempts to use Henry’s knees as stepping stones, but the blacksmith deals him a good shove into the drying leaves. It smarts, and his crown of bone is knocked off, too. Antlers pitch askew into the oranges and browns—and he cusses as he laughs—and threatens exile, execution, stricture.

“You’re too late,” Henry snorts, finger-waggling and I-told-you-so, which is his best of all forms. He says _You’re the prince of a pile of dirt now_. He says: I’ve deposed you.

They do not find any lions to hunt or boars to spear or bears to kill. Instead, they fry rabbits in a skillet with onions, and feel still-hungry all night.

The river runs quietly downhill from their camp. In lieu of pork, Hans teaches Henry how to build a fish trap with dried old sticks, and in the morning, they’ll eat roasted trout on skewers. For now, though, the wide southern sky is pink upon the clustered birch tops and the dirt roads beyond, where stray sheep ding their bells, and flower fields buttress tatty fences. The young lord finds his old wine basket hidden in the rocky shallows where his last season’s self left it, and they drink themselves to sleep on jarred spirits, lying open in the cool grass under the bare bones moon.

Time moves forward. Spring ticks to summer, then fall, and the earth breathes its ribs in tight again.

 

* * *

 

The year’s harvest is counted in August. By autumn, everyone sees who will live and who, without mercy, will die.

 

* * *

 

In winter, Henry breaks a glass. He does not mean to do it. It is an old thing, and it crumbles in his hand.

Silver Skalitz was no stranger to cold months. Perched upon its grassy hill, with its low wall and thinly-spread lindens, the village shivered. Blizzards weighed wood houses down. Brush rabbits turned white and gaunt. People went lean on pickled radishes and stringy grouse. It is easy to imagine Henry overbundled in wool, holding his bare hands too close to the heat of the forge.

South, in Rattay, December is wet and blinding and brilliant. Stone castles rupture the windhowl. Oil lanterns burn away the early nights. Little black birds nest in church eaves stuffed with straw. The people, poor and rich, eat bloody meat and wear perfumed furs. Hunting horses in red blankets dance over the snow.

Rattay is not so frozen as Skalitz, you see. But it must _feel_ colder; all season, Henry lives between hearths and stoves, looming around fire with hunched shoulders and blushing ears. He is useless and miserable on watch, tarrying too long by the courtyard braziers, waiting for Bernard or Nightingale to chase him away. He does not seem to enjoy the wintertide fox hunts (Hans makes him come along, anyway). He struggles to breathe warmly into his tattered red scarf. He walks about shrunken and squinting like a skinny old man.

It is too drafty in the dirty and threadbare bailey room Hanush granted him, so on some afternoons, Hans lets Henry hide in the library, huddled on the floor with bent knees and propped elbows while the lordling himself sits at a dark table to pen letters. He has a great number of letters to pen—for this year, it is the young lord’s twenty-fifth birthday, and Uncle will not delegate one dip of the ink to the scribes. You must learn, he says. You must do it on your own.

Candidly, what Uncle says is: _“Do it yourself, you wine-drenched dolt. Why your father wasted all that education on you is a sorry mystery.”_

Father’s education has made Hans bright and bold and haughty. He knows his uncle can’t write. He, who can, wonders: “ _Why should it matter, who answers the squabbling petty-nobles? Nothing will come. Nothing will change.”_

 _“Or shall I write,”_ he wonders, too old and too young all the same. “ _Shall I write,”_ he dares, “ _to_ _the cuckold-king, and ask him nicely to make me a man?”_

 _“Mind your own fucking papers,”_ Hanush snaps, and like that, the month of December is closed.

He makes the most of it. He fills the black iron fireplace with an armful of stolen cedar that makes the air bookish and sweet. He asks for warm drink and warm bread. He tells a servant he is very busy reading legal precedent and not to disturb him. _Oh, well,_ says Young Lord Capon, and like sneaking a stray dog, he brings the blacksmith in.

Henry sits on the wolfskin rug close to the fire and—though he is on-duty—drinks the mulled wine Hans gives him. It is hot black Iberian wine in a Venetian glass, stirred with sticks of cinnamon and cloves and honey. But luxury impresses and bores a blacksmith in unpredictable ways. He sips sullenly; he is less moved by art and foreign drinks than he is by soft shirts, buttoned up the sleeves; and boar steak, pink-in-the-middle; and horses of solid colors with family names. He has a plain face and a prominent Adam’s apple and his fingertips go flushed when it’s cold.

Hans has been teaching Henry how to read, but he’s not yet skilled enough to enjoy books. This is no concern; he is content to sit. Being indoors calms Hal. His has been an existence out-of-doors since Skalitz; fireside, the simple look upon the blacksmith’s face is two parts relief and one melancholy, like he is thinking of something very far away.

They are different in that way, he supposes. Hans feels his wild child’s-heart rest only in the shadow of trees.

“You know, you _could_ write one or two,” the young lord hints, only partway a joke. He lifts up the wet tip of his quill and tickles his own ear with hawkfeather. “Give me a helping hand? Practice your signature? Curl your capital H?”

Henry honks preposterousness as he holds dark wine by the fire. Hans feels alone at his table. It would be easy to ball up a sheet of parchment and throw it, but this winter, he is truthfully not feeling so playful. His heart feels boggy and a too-threatening calm.

“Write what?” the blacksmith wonders, twisting ‘round on the rug to shoot a skeptical eyebrow. “Shall I negotiate your yearly rum allotment, sir? Salutations to the monastery?”

“If you honestly want to know. I am presently writing a letter of grief and apology to my father’s—my—vassal at Ledetchko. We supply their carts with the retiring stud-stock from Neuhof. None to speak of this year, obviously.”

“Oh. That’s interesting.”

“No, it isn’t, you fucking turnip. Horses for grain-hauling, Hal. Carthorses.”

“Maybe not for you. But you don’t live or die by a load of oatcakes, do you.”

“Don’t be a fishwife about it.”

“I’m not fishing. It’s just—I think about it. If what happened at Neuhof had happened a year earlier. And Ledetchko had been left short on carting horses. Well. Ledetchko ships a portion of Rattay’s grain. If you’d been out a quarter of your stores from last year when we showed up, starving and burned half-to-death, would Sir Hanush have cleared the gates?” Hal pauses. The fireplace crackles beyond him, smelling of shallow forest. He looks, for a time-again, far from here. “I suspect he’d have blown us a kiss and told us keep on walking.”

“Horsecock. He’s friendly enough with Radzig; he’d have let you drop your tents, one way or the other.”

“Don’t think so. Not if it’d starve your people to do it. Wouldn’t be much of a lord, if he did.”

“Then I’d have commanded it. We could’ve fit some of you in, at least.”

“Why for? Anyway, lot that would have mattered. You couldn’t pick me out from the executioner’s girl, back then.”

“What do you know about it,” Hans snaps, for something in his heart feels a panic—a final pull of darkness overhead like a knife at his stomach and the smell of his dogs’ blood and a silver mask and a strong hand over the apple of his throat.

Here the glass fails. It turns to dust on the blacksmith’s fingers; Henry curses more from the surprise than the pain. Deep red Spanish wine spackles the goldenrod collar of his Rattay waffenrock, and he grabs his wrist frightfully, as though the blood might flow much faster than it does.

Hans tells him not to mourn the glass. It was a gifted set from some forgettable hobnobbing noble—one Mother cared little enough about to leave behind when she retreated, all those years ago, to her ancestral home in Polná, leaving young Hans behind, too. No one will miss it, he brushes. He drops a silk napkin on the silver pelt and steps a bootheel down, mopping up drink, knowing both will be bruised forever but unable to make himself care.

Henry fusses in a corner with his minor wound. There is something muted about him, Hans thinks—not just now, but always, like someone who once felt too much in a single instant and is waiting for the body to cool before he can feel any more, like a blade that has been dipped too fast into heat and dulled.

“Let me see it,” Hans grouses when he does not come rightaway over. This lord orders and whines in tandem, so that whim cannot be separated from command; that is his style of lordship. He does not want, even in the worst and most sincere of his whining, to remove the option of _no_. "You're getting blood all around. Bring it here."

"It's painful enough without mucking-with!"

“Give it over,” Hans insists, until the blacksmith relents, shuffling to the desk and thrusting it out for Sir Capon’s assessment.

It is only a little bit of blood. There is a glitter of glass still inside like crumbled stars, and he really should take it out. Hans ponders lifting the cut to his lips, but decides it too predictable. He is not an animal of prediction; he lives to flout and defy and surprise; and, more than most other things, to distract. For Hans understands the desperation of distraction. His whole meaning and purpose in Henry’s life is as distraction. And he does not feel badly about it, truly. Distraction is the sine qua non of living, the pivot of being wholly alive, the condition without which no liberation and no complete joy can be had. He does not seek to force someone so demolished to spill his suffering just to make himself understood. He has never been cruel enough to ask anyone that. He has never bared anyone’s bones. He only wants to see if he can get his blacksmith’s boy to do something new.

So instead he slips a silver pen knife into the fold of his own free palm under the table and squeezes, opening a line between his longest fingers, until the secret middle is wet and burning. Before the blacksmith guesses what His Young Lordship is about, Hans unfolds his fist over Henry’s accident and lets red drip where it will. One on the heel of the hand, three on the pad, two on the upturned wrist over the large blue veins.

Henry curses and his hand escapes, but only because Hans does not try to hold on. “What did you do that for!” come cries of disbelief. “Are you insane? Are you that drunk?”

Now we’re brothers, Hans decrees.

Henry is less sure. He puts his cut into his mouth like a cat with a thorn in its paw. His is a flatter and more realistic mind. “Now we’re bleeding,” he mutters, sorely.

“Don’t complain. Couldn’t you use a brother?”

“I could sooner use a bandage.”

Hans does not care. If he cared about complaints, he would never have spoken to Henry, at all—would never have challenged him, would never have called him mean names that made his heart smoke furiously through the ash-glass of that immense numbness, would never have taught him a thing.

 _Oh, leave it alone,_ Hal complains when Hans heaves an oversized sigh and resigns from the table to mock his displeasure. _Go on. I’m sick, too,_ he grouses, palm heel bitten clumsily between his teeth, twisting his face and his bleeding paw away, not wanting to be pestered or kissed-at, but Hans does not care about that, either. He chases him ‘round two or three turns, grabbing for the arm, forgetting entirely about his own little wound and leaving a loud brown bloodprint on Henry’s dingy gambeson sleeve. He backs him recklessly into a shelf of books, but that is no real evasion; he jumps and snatches when the blacksmith tries to escape by holding his hand high over his head; and, finally, he catches it.

By the wrist, he drags Henry to a latticed glass window and opens it. Outside, the air above the trench is a sodden gray and the aspens pose bare-white on their hills, like fingerbones. Winter is immediately at their faces then tickles the floors of their lungs, and it makes Henry tremble noisily, but Hans’s blood runs hot; he is never daunted by cold. He holds their hurt hands out face-up so that the largest flakes will slow the bleeding.

“Brothers do this, do they?” Hal chatters out, and the cold reveals the crystals in his breath.

When they are clean with snow, he shuts the window tightly. He ties up the blacksmith’s paw with a ribbon of pilfered fabric. His own, he leaves open to the sun and the stinging air.

He leaves open his bedroom window, too.  When the new frost creeps into the eaves and the oiled furs are heaped upon his bed, Lord Capon breathes deep, for he is unafraid of sickness. He wakes the next morning with ice on the glass and a freshly red throat, alone.

 

* * *

 

The world goes green again. The soldiers practice out-of-mail. The wheel of the river mill turns.

In Rattay, there is change, stern and sudden and carried out in a stilted sort of silence—the sort where everyone knows what is happening, and yet everyone bites their tongues. Age and the Order of Things have finally closed ranks. They collar their tod fox of a lord.

Hanush is a noble old bear. He is not fast and flighty, but knows as the old trout-catchers do he will win. The bearpaws close. There will be no daylight drinking and no days wiled away in hot bathwater. There will be no witchy bathmaids or blacksmith’s boys. There will be no waking with dawn and sprinting into the woods to fashion his barbarian crown. Instead, there is an hourglass, and its rules are finite; sand cannot be disobeyed.

 _You,_ Hanush tells him, _are going to learn how to come when I call you._

 _Like a dog?_ Hans sasses.

 _Like a spaniel,_ Hanush agrees. _Or I’ll close down that whorehouse. I’ll shutter up your fucking wine cellar. I’ll send Henry away._

He says: _I’ll burn those woods to the ground._

Fast is broken at eight. Politics are spoken with Uncle and Sir Radzig and Master Feyfar. Young Sir Hans sits with his flatcakes and jam and drinks water with no wine. Court begins at ten, then stretches on through all the best pheasant-hunting hours—agonizing, heartbreaking. Bernard, who loves him best of anyone, builds an archery range in an unused corridor so that His Lordship may practice between sessions, though he finds a bow in his hands worsens his fever for woods and for drink. Young Sir Hans hears the guard horses whinny outside and the garrison dogs bark at stableboys. He shakes with thirst and energy. Sweet beer seeps in on warm air from the uptown taverns. Smoke rises from the mill.

He does not look longingly to the castle windows, for his loneliness is too great to waking-dream about, and his stomach aches for freedom only allowed during evening. Nearly-dark is his domain now, fleeting and thin. But Young Sir Hans is not a creature of darkness. He cannot stop his body from waking at six. His heart grows older. He waits in his room among his painted animals, keening for sun. He sits still.

 

* * *

 

In fall, the harvest is closing and court shortens. Rattay’s cage bars widen, a little, and Sir Hans is starved down. He slips a sort-of-free.

On the first Tuesday of the young season, for good luck and for bribery—(he may never completely unlearn his notion that friendship is won by competition and maintained with gifts)—Hans buys Henry a pair of new boots. They are fine black leather made for silver spurs and polished floors, and would be better-placed on a donnish city lordling than a blacksmith’s boy. But his old pair is falling apart, and when he picks up an equally worn replacement from the cobbler’s shelf, this lordling yanks them out of his hands.

Henry worries over his boots obsessively. He walks around puddles and cringes each time he steps over mud. They are the most expensive thing he’s owned—for the armor is merely a barracks loan, and so the weapons, and so the dappled patrol horse, too. It annoys Hans so, all this hopping and grimacing and anxious carefulness, he wishes loudly that he’d just let the blacksmith have his shoddy workman’s shoes. He is still, for all his learning, a poor lord. He does not yet understand the need to walk gently or preserve.

In fall, they ride over the river bridge and hunt red does. Henry is a nanny chicken about missing his soldiering duties, so Hans must wait and wait for noontime patrol to saddle his mare and trot off. On these days, he meets Hal by the willow tree behind the bathhouse, under the overgrown footpath to Gallows Way, where it smells always of crushed mint leaves and old graves. From there, he can hear the grinding of the millhouse and the bark of the tanner’s dogs. He listens until he hears instead the blacksmith’s lazy palfrey plodding messily down the city hill in its barnyard shoes.

To reach the low fields, where the stream is sunwarm and the deer hunt is easy, they must cross the thicket ‘round the mill yard. Hans hopes persistently for a glimpse of the miller. Old Peshek peters around with a rake, but it is, of course, not Peshek he itches to see.

This young lord of Rattay once hiked on his tippy-toes and jumped both arms over the tall bathhouse fence at to get a glance—one peep of the miller’s niece from Skalitz as she cast grains to her uncle’s hens or swept a cobbled stoop. But from his circle of steaming tents and drying flowers, he could not tell what she looked like. He got splinters in his underelbows that Zdena would later tease him about. They stung in the bathwater with lavender and lime.

 _“She came here once,”_ Klara had whispered—for Klara is young, like him, and as such, she understands how to make everything bland and everything painful feel dangerous and fun. The maid turned over a used outdoor tub and then offered to catch Sir Hans’s ribs as he dropped down from the fence. _“Asked to buy a sachet of salt.”_

 _“Is she pretty?”_ the young lord asked, ears twitching, keen as a fox on a winter hare. “ _How does she speak? Is she clever? Is she beautiful?”_

 _“She’s a miller,”_ Klara shrugged, and this is all he knows.

It is satisfying, though, to some edge of meanness inside of him that Hal always holds a breath until they ride clear of the scraggly fruit trees and are afield. He does not want his befores and afters to intertwine.

“Are you afraid I’ll snatch your maiden,” Hans teases, disguising his unhappiness the same way an arrogant colt does, with serrated play and a just-this-side-of-nasty snap. His mare’s hooves step too high to stir much dust as they pass the tanners. “Pull her petals so well she won’t look at you twice?”

Henry admonishes him. But his voice is subdued, his secondhand saddle creaks, and his eyes are cast down. “It isn’t that way.”

“You ought to invite her on the hunt. We lack a virgin.”

“She wouldn’t like that.”

“No?” Lord Capon dismays, but there is unkindness in his game. There are prickly barbs in all his suggestions, playful or real, he cannot ever remove. No matter how much or how meanly he jokes and no matter how much he would like to, he cannot expunge the capacity to order, the right of his birth. Hans is sure this power—his unspoken but understood lordly _power-to—_ is the worst knowledge that exists between them, and there is no true and final way to cut it out. “Well, then! If she won’t come along. You must go to her.”

“I’m not—”

“You must! Go,” Hans says. “Go on, then. Go off to your maid, miller though she be.”

Henry looks uneasy. He looks more-than; he looks strung wide-armed between two quick horses. Hans feels at his own farthest edges a sure seep of shame.

 _Here_ , he says, and reaches high from his stirrups, snapping a branch of white blossoms from an apple tree. He is sorry. He wishes often he were someone else. “Give her a flower.”

Henry cringes as his new black boots hit the dirt road. The branch loses petals. He walks tail-down toward the mill like a scolded hound, though he is nothing like that—and Hans ought to call him back, but does not—for when Lord Capon is behaving badly, it is best to treat him like a sunshower—to go along with the rain so that it passes swiftly, without excess of drama, only minor damage done.

He should not be unkind. He has no real right. It is not fair, besides. Hans has made no secret of his favorite women, some of whom are nearly-friends or could-be-friends, were money and station not what they are. He will be expected to marry someday soon. He has tried very hard to fall madly, obviously in love with the butcher’s daughter—whom he also cannot have—but one cannot insist their way into madness. He has even shared, in as much as any of them are a man’s to share (which is not much), his bathmaids with Henry, as a matter of circus and of brothers-they-are. It would not burn so badly, he is sure, if Henry would share his millmaid with him.

He does not, of course. That isn’t, of course, the way.

Henry returns too soon from the mill yard. No one follows him—not his dress-wearing maid, not her uncle chasing behind with a rake poised for the backside of a cheeky lad’s head. The blacksmith seems smaller, somehow. There is a feather-fine freckling of fresh flour on the heels of his new boots. He does not carry the flower anymore.

“That was quick! Poor girl,” Hans trills, looking bright-faced on his dark horse. “Go back in there and do it properly.”

Henry’s face is sad in that way it is whenever he is being punished. Hans’s vulgarity goes untended-to. The blacksmith reaches carefully for his gelding’s saddle and pulls himself up, over, until leather resettles. The air smells of breadcrusts and brown riverwater.

“I told her I couldn’t very well stay for a chat,” he mumbles, sore now to have humored it all.

“Oh, did you say you were off on a jolly afternoon stag hunt? Did you tell your grindstone sweetheart the governor was outside waiting, ears back and biting at the bit?”

Thinly: “Somehow I didn’t mention that.”

“Shame,” he sighs. Lord Capon squeezes his knees in and claps the reins, and they steer away down the sage-overtaken path, toward water, under a cloudless blue snap of sky. The arrows are smart and ready on his back. “All this high-and-mighty malingering and worldly prestige,” laments he, “and you don’t even try to impress a woman.”

“Do you think I need to use _you_ to impress women?”

Shod hooves on the bridge planks go clack-clock. The air is cool enough to make the young lord want for more happiness than he has—to salvage, at least, a hunt. But the deer will not stir again until evening; it is too late and too early, at once. He stands up in the stirrups to stretch his legs and the bow snugly over his shoulder is not as good as the one he’s given away.

“Oh, I don’t know! You might have,” Hans protests. “Or what good am I for?”

Henry’s friends were killed. It happened in summer, while Hans was here-away in Hanush’s courts. One lost his guts to Robard’s men; the other was hanged on the road north to Skalitz. He knows this now only as an afterthought—only because something unimportant, said in passing, reminded a blacksmith of his dead old boys.

It is strange for him to think of this, for the realization that his friend has other friends is always disorienting, unwelcome like a splash of cold water to the face. He wept when it happened, Hans is sure. He must have dropped into the millmaid’s arms by the riverside and cried under the smell of flour.

 _“Doesn’t so much matter now, does it.”_ Hal told him only that, shrugging, dry and sealed-up like a new blade. His lord is disallowed his tears. _“My ma and pa said it first, and they were right, they were. But what did I know, before.”_

Hans hears this and his deep bones ache with jealousy. Henry has to tell him things. He does not know, as she does, all the stories. He has no wordless, ageless knowing of how it was Before.

“Perhaps I wanted to meet the darling lass,” he says. He says, “Perhaps I’d like to see if she’s pretty enough for you.”

The blacksmith does not protest for his millmaid. He does not argue or scold, or threaten to trounce the noble brat, or wave away whatever prickish thing Hans blurted just for the sake of provoking something new. He goes quiet, only. Quiet cuts close to the throat.

“She’s my friend,” he says.

Hans laughs loud and larkishly to dull the perplexing hurt around his heart. “Wonderful! We have something in common.”

Henry has some knowing of his own, after all. When Lord Capon tires of talking—when he kicks his horse in the ribs and gallops off, flying towards red deer and the last of August sun on old beeches, demonstrating how quickly, how naturally, a blacksmith’s boy might be left behind—he does not rightaway chase after. He lets himself grow smaller in the grass field, looking down at the shine on his polished black toes.

 

 

 

He had a sister once, but only for a moment. She was there like a summer and gone like grape leaves in the fall.

Sickness—as it is with all fragile things of grass and blood. Hans’s memories of her are few, but clear as the droplets of shivering ice that kill the too-early dogwood blooms. She had thin orange hair and a pinched Moravian nose. She was inimitably tall, or so it seemed to him, a sylph of awkward elbows and chalky forearms, her adolescence like an aspen’s. For some reason, she is confused with the smell of fresh butter at breakfast and the sleeves of clamshell blue gowns. Her name was Gisela. But for little brothers, older sisters exist without name; they are simply the one most like you, made bigger and better; a You of superior wit and power. They are like young gods.

He was not quite eight when his sister died. Before her illness, she would walk him often along the grassy moatside, golden with dry heat and rough with wildflowers, to pick up pretty rocks. She enjoyed being poised, like sharp-eyed white goats, along the edge of a sudden drop.

As she was there one day—and then she was, put simply, not.

He had known, even at not-quite-eight, there was only one place his sister would be at rest. Father and Mother would never consent to bury her on a cliff, of course. A preposterous, blasphemous thing to be entombed in nature, to be reclaimed by unconsecrated forest. So the boy did not ask. He broke two limbs off an old red cedar, tied them together with a length of twine, and buried a handful of her stolen hair ribbons at the foot of this shabby cross. There she is perched, Hans wants to believe, in the rocky white bluffs over Rattay, where the dirt is warm and soft with pine needles.

In autumn, when he shows him the grave, one late afternoon after an aimless and roundabout hunt, Henry asks with cautious voice if a dead woman is really resting here—if his sister really is tucked into unconsecrated earth beneath a reckless marker. _Of course not,_ Hans explains, snapping down branches to fashion a fresh cross. He pulls and chucks last winter’s rain-rotted one over the cliffside, where it is lost to the wind. Of course a lordly lady cannot rest here, cannot be let free to decompose into sparkling rocks and black-shelled bugs that glint under sunlight and tiny grape flowers witches use to make their poisons smell sweet. Of course, his sister’s corpse is locked away in the family catacombs, intertwined with gray soil and long-dead spiderwebs and hellish bellsong above her eyeless head. He hopes he’ll die in the wild.

“Somewhere they can’t recover me,” he prays, grinning uneasily at the blacksmith with nervous teeth and the eyes of a frightened fox. “Deep in a gorge. Under a black old bog. Eaten by forest dogs, never to be found. Bones in the river for a thousand years.”

Henry, he says. Do you think we’ll be friends forever?

“I thought we were brothers,” remembers Henry, avoiding him, for Henry is a jaybird and never says anything real. It is Hans who does the honesty between them, for honesty is a type of destruction, and Henry cannot face that. He has seen enough of fire, and now will not look directly at anything that feels too much like it might one day go aflame. “Doesn’t leave us much choice, does it.”

The young lord is skinny-eyed and his hair is wheat-red and his thin voice is full of skepticism that looks like a dare. “Brothers who fuck in the hay shed?”

“Well,” Henry defers. “You’re the one said it, not me.”

It is getting cool out. He commits the new wild cross into the dirt like a spear, then sits upon his heels, letting sun hurt the gray in his eyes and turn his edges a huntable bronze, considering the color of this bricky soil and the ungroundedness of the grief you grieve when there is no body to be visited. Henry stands behind him with folded arms and an empty quiver. He is not sure if their stories are the same.

“My father used to tell me that the good Lord doesn’t mean for anything to last forever. Everything good and evil is just for a while,” says the blacksmith, who has never spoken to Hans of his father—who has not bared his ribs in April, or May, or any season. “But there’s no telling how long the while is, so we ought to stop caterwauling about when it ends and be there for it while it’s upon us.”

Time, he knows, is the only certainty. Henry is headshy of vulgarity, and does not like when Hans talks about what they’ve done or what they will do—does not like the blunt proximity of himself to the word fuck—but there is no other way Hans can think of to say it, and there is nothing vulgar in his heart. It is not faster he asks for, but closer. He does not want to turn his head or look away. He drapes around or pulls against or urges nearer until, spurred by a tug on his hair and an affection of encouragement, Henry breaks helplessly into his arms, shivering everything out like a spring bunny. Still, they are not yet the same.

Hans waits with the sun at his front. He says: “Then I hope we’re friends for a long, long while.”

They will have to be a little different, whether he likes it or not.

Before dark falls, shepherding them back to castles and stables and separate spaces, Hans pulls a foxglove for his sister’s grave. Henry does not have anything to give away. But he, too, leaves a flower at the cliffside, where they freeze in the chill overnight.

 

* * *

 

Winter, colorless. The trouble in Merhojed takes a long time and there is no green anywhere, anywhere. There are no bones yawning up from the snow.

Blue ice has interrupted the river and shut up the bathhouse. Radzig’s soldiers are all away. There is nothing for Hans to do but write letters and hold court and sip warmed cups in the study, yet he discovers the taste of his drink less thrilling than year last’s, and dark wine reminds him sharply of his loneliness. There are no lions or witches in the naked woods when Bernard goes with him. He casts his limp game hares to the Skalitz refugees shivering in their hide-draped tents. He hunts the same old thing.

 

He hunts:

roe in the skeleton fields of wood-rush and barley

birds among the frost-shrunken grapes

stags along the ice-hard stream

wolves in the bosks below the hills of Neuhof

and hares in the deep winter trees.

 

He hunts more than can be eaten and returns with his catch. Lords and officers and officers’ ladies sup at the dining table over trays of carved swan and weeping venison and candied pears and braised bushfowl. Hans sits among things he has chased into ruin with a fierce and flighty-hearted hunger that is not sated by honeyed pork or wild mutton. He feels focused, but odd. He listens to Bernard compliment him with his kill in his mouth and stares, his the distant gray eyes of a kennel animal, undistractable. He watches his uncle break thin bones and tell jokes he should comprehend but does not. He feels he cannot be still. He feels as though he is panting at his place like a dog who does not realize it has already eaten its spoils.

He hunts daily. He can see far in the snow. He looks in these months at the refugees, trying to learn their faces. If he cannot be that kind of lord, he is at least the kind who appreciates, here-and-now, how easy it would be for any one of them to wear a red scarf.

The miller’s niece wears blankets of old wool as she walks her uncle’s millyard. Hans sees her, finally, when he is hunted-out and homeward-bound one late afternoon, rounding the snowed-over river bridge on his gray mare. She is not godly or clever. She is only pretty and cold.

She stops on the thin crunch of frozen mud and blinks at the young man astride the courser with his string of white winter ducks. Hans is not sure if she recognizes him. Hans is not sure if she knows him, at all, and he wills down his sharp and wild-mad pang to speak with her—to dismount and sprint across the stiff grasses like she is not Henry’s but his—to ask about everything, to know what she knows, to share whatever it is they share in common.

Instead, Peshek steps from the storehouse with his scowl and his rake to see what is going on. Hans trots to the millyard fence, and under barren apple trees, passes the miller his fattest bird.

 _Panem_ , he says, when he drops the rest of the flock into a shocked beggar’s basket, caring less about Latin than he has in an age. The snow lies down upon his sister’s grave like cat feet. The circuses must wait.

Hanush is kind in cold weather. He brings his nephew a new book and tells bawdy tales before the fireplace. He stays up late under the stuffed blond deer heads Father once shot, and suggests a joust in spring, when the Sasau road is clear enough for horsecarts. He proposes planning a Christmas party and calls for tarts and more mead. But Hans is tired, and full, and asks to go abed early, where he need think of nothing but hot water and the black stags painted upon his chamber walls.

 _“And here I thought you were finally grown out of your moods. But no—you’ve only switched choler for melancholer,”_ Hanush harrumphs after him, but his teeth are not in it. He toasts the deer heads on the wall. “ _You’ll find that none of us can have it all, little birdie.”_

There is frost inside his window glass. Lord Capon orders a bath, calls more cedar for the fire, opens a cask of black wine. But finds it goes cold around him—his heart is too light to sink in.

 

* * *

 

In March, the thaw comes early, and the stiff world is greening. But it is not yet spring.

In nearly-spring, Radzig retires his infantry from Merhojed. All the soldiers return to Rattay. It doesn’t rain for days over Pirkstein as they march south, and the dry trees along the Rovna road take a long time to unroll—but they will—and the woolly clouds promise fruit-growing water. Red foxes roam the woods again. Hans walks around with a giddy and swollen heart.

A blacksmith really is a hilarious excuse for a soldier, anyway. He comes home from battle looking like a sheep-herd in a brigandine, like a person made to sleep under a willow with a calf in his arm and a flower behind his ear.

Left alone, Henry will sleep past noon, but Hans is up with the sun and cannot bear to lie around. Some mornings, he bangs on the blacksmith’s frail bailey room door and claps haughtily for him to fetch his gloves and cloak. Others, he tears the covers from his own bed and pours leftover pitcher-wine on Henry’s face as it drools there; he pinches his under-knees or blows into his ear. But most mornings, he is weak with an excess of mercy. He wakes on his own and lets Henry sleep and goes out of doors.

It is dewy and brisk on Rattay’s streets by dawn; the horse withers twitch in the stable, and cold toadstools peep from short grass. Poor Master Feyfar’s rheumatism oft has him walking the dining hall sipping hot marjoram even before Lord Capon comes in chasing the sunlight, looking for sausage and apples. He sits with the old man out of pity. Feyfar is polite but gregarious; with an audience, he natters furiously, like he cannot help it. _Surely_ , he hesitates, catching himself between rambles of economics and engineers; _surely_ _you would rather be out afield at your hunt than in here with a sick old stick_ ; _surely your Lordship has something more pressing to do_.

This fog is no good for buck-hunting, Hans says. He eats his apples and listens to the old man prattle while a foreign, mothwing happiness tests the inside tissues of his heart. He endeavors to finish all of his duties done before the mists lift and the season of bones arrives.

Henry, at least, is unchanging. His heart is surefooted if not entirely bright or brave.

“Don’t kid yourself with all this thaw and fog—the cold’s not had it yet. You watch. Before you know it,” the blacksmith warns him at night, pushing a breadcrust around the plate of game the young lord has brought him, leaving some behind for the marshalsea piglets nextdoor. “Winter again.”

Yes, says Hans. But summer, first.

 

 

 

War arrives before either. Talmberg is breached and then besieged, and the entire province flusters to Divish’s aid. Little Lord Capon, too.

They set off north armored-up and high-stepping in a mean little cavalry line. Bernard places Hans upon a hateful red-hot destrier (for Lord Capon will not see his favorite hunting mare ruined by Cuman caltrops or Hungarian arrows) that boils under its skin and scares the other horses away from him. He sits straight-backed and warm in his plates of Sasau steel. He wears his sharpest spurs.

It is too much horse for him. Hans is a firm rider, but he wrestles with the destrier, and—bluntly—pulls it rearward, so his soldiers do not see their lord fight with his animal. The blacksmith’s pokey little palfrey is by the same luck able to mostly keep up. As they walk into evening over dandelions and thistle, road pitching up through the wooded hills, stallion shaking its mane threateningly the whole way under caparison and bridle, Hans hears Henry lose and gain ground again. Locusts shrill from spruces in the orange near-dark. Armored men drone ahead of them. Even so, the jangling of tack and snorting charger do not wholly mask a suspicious rummaging noise.

When the noising grows too bothersome to be ignored, Lord Capon twists around in his stiff gilded gorget to see. “Are you _eating_ , Henry?”

But the blacksmith behind him cannot answer through stuffed cheeks. He’s been munching happily upon frosted pastries, all huddled inside the woven basket Henry has tucked in one arm, letting his dapple plod freely up the road in his lord’s footsteps. The confection is annihilated in two messy bites and he’s rummaging for another before it’s even swallowed.

It’s hard to be annoyed with him. But Hans manages it.

“ _Really_?” he bemoans. Pebbles ( _Pebbles!_ ) nickers a cautious friendliness on approach, but the lord’s red warhorse lays his ears flat back, and that’s the end of that. “Where did you even get those?”

“Margaret,” Henry says, simple as anything, chewing ambitiously. Crumbs are away down his red scarf and he’s got honey stuck plainly on his face, squeezed a bit by the bascinet.

“Who?”

“Margaret,” he says again. “Your uncle’s cook.”

If he looks foolish (and he does) in the Madgeberg breast Hanush gave him as an ambivalent reward for some vague notion of _service_ , it is because Hans cannot unremember the way he looked before. Henry has a clean, simple face and open, irreproachable eyes. He looks like what he is, which is guileless and georgic. He is the blind boy missing targets under Rattay Castle’s arches, even dressed in fine brocade and black bootheels, even inside polished steel. He is forever stunned and full of brightness with no meaning. He is like sunlight on lakewater. Ridiculous, to put him in plate! The crimson around his neck is like a gash bleeding hopelessly through bandage. Even so.

Even so, he knows, too, the fresh sight of this boy returning from Vranik in the night with fierce dents hammered into his new armor. _Look at this_ , Henry marveled like a child, dipping his finger up to the knuckle in a cavern roundabout his belly-button, the signature of a German flail. He laughed, flummoxed. He did not seem to mind his black eye or his blistered hands. He said _I don’t even know how to go about hammering these out._ Imprints of mace teeth over the lungs, into the stomach, metal bites into metal three inches deep. And seeing them, Hans felt for all the world that he might drop to his knees and kiss his uncle’s hands.

“The cook? You bought baking? On a military campaign?”

“Didn’t buy them. She gave them to me.”

 “For what?”

“Well, the road, I suspect.”

“No, no,” Hans objects. His charger stomps as an early firefly pesters its nose, and gives its tail a vehement flick. “Why is Uncle’s cook giving you gifts?”

Henry considers his basket of honey buns, finds no answer, and blithely shrugs. “Must like me, I suppose. She said I was a good boy.”

“A good—? That just happens to you. Like so. _‘Good boy, Henry; here’s a present?’_ ”

“Sometimes,” he agrees, and shoves another pastry into his mouth.

Hans narrows overshoulder. The blacksmith moves to brush his palms on his hose, only to just-then realize he is in fact wearing metal chausses.

“You’re like a walking children’s story, do you know that?” Hans complains. “Peasant Henry, the Good Boy,” he goads. “Little Henry Goes to Market. Good Boy Henry and the Talmberg War.”

Henry finishes for now, re-covers his snack, and cleans his sugary fingertips one-and-the-next in his mouth.

“Good Boy Henry,” says he, “and the Bad Young Lord.”

 

 

 

In spring, the hills are bright joyful green and they are making war. Wounded Talmberg bleeds chalk down in the low fields, far from them, but not too far. Their tents are carnival yellow and dirty white and look pretty, all flapping in the country sun.

When Henry returns to the camp, they tell him Sir Hans has gone hunting in the skinny woods to the north, and so he sets off on foot up the warm red road in search of his lord. Rabbits and roe deer are a meager offering from these thin cedars and the humble stream isn’t fishable. He can’t have gone far. Yet there are no tracks on the dry earth, and no answer to his flagging calls. Henry stops by the water to wet his ears before they burn.

This time of year, tadpoles are churning the creeks. They scatter at the swish of fingers. The water is cool and mossy beneath pimpled sunlight—good water—and it is quite hot on the fields beyond, so much so that Henry undoes the top clasps on his gambeson and bends low to splash his face.

Lord Capon attacks from a blackthorn bush while he is water-blind and tackles him flat. They fight gawkily on the dirt road. Before he knows what the devil has him, the blacksmith is belly-up and straddled across the ribcage and being pummeled by gleeful fists.

He hits him three or four more times before Hal has the wherewithal to react. Henry smacks Hans’s fists away angrily, caught in the strangle of his startled outrage and surprise.

“You—!” he chides, spluttering, flush-faced. Hans punches him once more in the soft undergut because he can’t possibly resist. “What’re you about, jumping at people?! Are you cracked, you dumb fucking saddle-goose! I might have killed you!”

Henry is heavier and broader in body, but Hans is a half-head taller and leaner and demonstrably stronger. He is a faster runner with a longer stride, pound-for-pound meaner. He does not have the build of someone whom Mother’s love once made slightly fat.

“If I were Toth’s man, you’d be bleeding in a pile,” Hans laughs, a scatterbrained sound, pleased with himself and warmth of the sun. His kneecaps sting from contact with the pebbly shore; Hal tries to chuck him off, but it’s not enough. Hans stabs three fingers of his still-free hand into Henry’s ribs. “Pay more attention, blacksmith!”

“Horsing like a damned idiot,” Henry fumes, choking on his embarrassment and disrupted fear. He gives the lord’s arm an unfriendly yank that hurts in the shoulder. “It’s a warzone, for Christ’s sake!”

For Hans’s sake, he is overjoyed. He daggers Hal several more times with the blade made of fingers—stomach fat, thigh, tender sides. He sings through his bitey teeth as the blacksmith jumps and squirms: _And you’re dead, dead, dead._

“Get off me,” Henry grumbles, and upsets him with a push.  “Fool.”

Hans hits the red road in a limby thump. And as he laughs, detached and daffy with his heart growing vines up his throat, careless dust stirs over shallow water. It looks like it will never come down.

In spring, he is free again as he has not been since Father died—free as a little bird—though it is small freedom, freedom with walls of canvas and trees. Rattay is far away and there is no court among the loose butter cows. _Stay close,_ Bernard begs him. The bones of young lords are as easily scattered as anyone else.

Twenty days, Master Kyeser promises, until their machine brings his temporary kingdom to a close.

Weeks pass. Construction is underway and Lord Capon has nothing to do but hunt hares and redden gently in the new April sun. He bores of feeding the army, for there are already scouts afield to stalk deer, and the chase feels paltry when it is merely an everyday must-be-done. The zip and chop of the siege lumber camp yonder dampens the wildness, too, and Talmberg’s pastures wake with daisies, not bones.

He and Henry walk into the woods to kiss and watch the building of the trebuchet on the hill below. It is a slow and imprecise work. Lackluster leadership leaves laborers guessing measurements; poor Master Feyfar doesn’t know a trebuchet from a soup tureen, and Master Kyeser would rather explain what he doesn’t need than what he does. Hans laughs at them running about their coop like plucked roosters.

 _Look at the little Bohemes scurry,_ he says, flinging his arm toward the west field and drinking watered-down wine. It is already too hot for such labor, but it is cool where he rests in the thin overspillage of young oak trees on the high hills toward Uzhitz, listening to sparrows and hiding from the heat. He lies slack in his armor on the short grass, facing taffy clouds, and lets Henry beside him lean over on a propped elbow to cup his chin and kiss his mouth. _Like a flock of laundresses. Like ants._

“Ants lobbing rocks, soon enough,” the blacksmith forebodes, a grim way to chase a kiss, and he stops to take the wineskin for a shallow drink. Henry, who has seen battle, bears an eerie peace in the way of bulls before a storm. He does not enjoy any of this antsiness or pomp. He knows better. Hans lies there blinking with his chin in Hal's hand and grins worry into dimples.

“I assuredly fucking hope so! Else Divish had better pull the wall-climbing tights out of retirement. I’ve already asked Kyeser if I can loose the first shot. Old Man Talmberg didn’t seem to think the question particularly lordly of me.”

“It _is_ his castle being shot-upon. You’d not feel so cheery if they were loading up boulders at Pirkstein, too, so don’t be a cad.”

Hans, who dislikes moralizing upon the obvious, hefts up to sit back upon his couters and commandeers Hal’s bottom lip to shut him up. He wishes he had something else to talk about that would not invite memories of black smoke or Cuman spurs. He considers unbuckling Henry’s chausses to suck his cock (if only to scandalize Henry into scolding and smacking his hands away), but it isn’t quite safe. He wishes, at least, he might still drink stronger wine.

“Defeat of defeats. His castle and his wife, at that,” grants Lord Capon. He reaches behind the blacksmith’s head to rub fingers and thumb through the badly cut hair there. “What do you think—is this Toth a handsome bastard? Do you reckon he batted his lashes at her, kissed her hand, won an exceedingly warm welcome? _'Oh, my! Whoever has come a-knocking at my poor, lonely gates in the absolute dead of night? Into the keep with you at once,'_ ” he teases, voice pitching ridiculous and high. _"'Hungarian, you say? The softest bed in the castle_ _, I insist! What was your name again?'"_

Hal snorts. “Don’t be unchristian.”

“ _You’re_ going to tell me about sobriety, chastity, and contrition?”  He gives the bristle a gentle, admonitory pull that makes Henry shiver predictably somewhere deep between the shoulders.  “I’m quite sure impersonating a monk means an eternity of hellfire for you, blacksmith.”

“Impersonating an assassin impersonating a monk—that’s a double-reverse sin, is what it is. Cancels one-and-the-other out. Learned it in monastery school.”

“You’re full of such shit!”

“You take it up with St. Benedict, you don’t like it. I’m just a humble novice.”

“Say it in Latin, you common liar. Read me my holy rites. Say _sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_ ”

“Parcel nos domine,” drones the blacksmith, flubbing it dourly, as Hans pushes him away. The lord laughs like cold water, and as the battle ticks itself into place alongside the riggings of trebuchet, the leaves in the oak trees shake with summer, almost. They go on: _Peace be with you, my brother. In saecula saeculorum. Unto the ages of ages._

 _But all the same,_ Henry says. Spare us.

 

 

 

In spring, the horn shrieks on the west field. Havel of Valdek marches his men across the river footbridge, and with a castle bleeding on his one side and revenge the other, Divish bristles to meet him. For lack of officers, Robard captains Henry, and they lay their ambush in the damp clover astride the Rovna ford.

From his camp at the east, Sir Hans sees the second line of enemy colors stepping down the far slope, a dozen unexpected bodies jangling toward the tall scrub where Talmberg’s guardsmen crouch with what remains of the Skalitz infantry. It is much more opposition than they’d planned for. He runs in his armor for his angry red horse to warn Bernard in the quarry camp, shouting for his complement to make ready, and this is when they mark the peal of alarum from Siege Hill.

Toth's men have skirted down the castleside and charge the war machine with every intention to destroy it. Builders flee hammers-in-hand from the weak ankles of their trebuchet. Havel Medek is nearly across the bridge. There is a deerheart spilling sand inside the young lord’s rib. Suddenly, in spring unending, the seasons of his life are zero. He cannot break in two directions. The last of his time is away.

There is a moment in the saddle with his Father’s sword at one hip and the livid-alive animal beneath him where Hans is not sure what he will do. Yet he looks from the black firs on the Rovna road to the smoke above Talmberg’s tower, and in his mind, he sees the faces of people below it; he sees their flag in the evening air is that same color red. What he wants is not always what must be.

Let go, the destrier flies toward Siege Hill faster than any chase Lord Capon has ever given before. Cavalrymen rush to change course in his wake but are outpaced as by fire in the wind. It is across the lowland and cresting the highground just as old man Feyfar scrambles away from a hatcheteer for his life.

Hans kills his first man without thinking. He charges between Master Feyfar and the soldier who pursues him, and with no sound and no thunder, sunders his lungs. There is nothing but the taste of forest and teeth in his mouth. It is only when he blinks down at the corpse amidst stamping hooves and churned dust that the young lord realizes he has not drawn his sword, but instead reached, by the memory of his bones, for a hunting spear.

The Rattay riders storm in from behind him. Feyfar crumples on the summer grass cradling a broken arm and thanks Hans for his life with his eyes. The dead man bleeds on the ground in confusion, spear in his chest like a boar.

They drive Toth’s raiders from the trebuchet before it is mortally wounded and snuff the started fires. By the time Uncle arrives at the hill, sweating mightily, puffing in gilded plackart, Bernard has already taken control of the perimeter. Father Godwin has come to bless and goodbye. Master Kyeser reassures Divish their machine will be ready in days.

Sir Hans sits on the ground in a smattering of marigolds to clean his father’s blade and calm his stomach. Shaken Feyfar effuses to anyone who will listen how the young lord took to their field like a lion unleashed, and when Hanush comes to roust his nephew from shock, Uncle’s bearpaws feel cool against his sick-sweat. He talks to him like he is a boy of fifteen. He holds his dimpled cheeks and tells him he’s done as a good son would. He tells him his late father never once put that fine sword to such churchy work. He tells him, without needing to be asked, that all is well on the Rovna road; no captain breached their line; no boots shored the bridge; no one’s killed your blacksmith’s boy.

 _Tell me again,_ Hans says, mindless, and Uncle does—all of it.

 _My ears,_ he tries, dazed, grabbing. _They’re ringing. Again, please. Once more._

“You’ll be a warlord yet, little birdie,” Hanush laughs, and smoothes his cousin’s distraught lick of yellow-red hair—for they are cousins, really— _uncle_ , too, is a half-fiction to ease the future—to make himself feel as though he is closer to family than to the edge of a cliff. “Your people are fine,” Uncle says, “and you’ll be, too. Clean your face, Capon.”

 _Was I crying,_ he strangles, parched inside of himself, hearing his own voice like a bell underwater, mopping for tears. But his fingers are numb, and so Hans cannot tell. And Hanush does not say. He merely steers him out of the fieldgrass, back towards the west camp, where his warhorse grazes freely along the hillside. He says nothing of the man run through with a spear. And if Hans, jaw trembling with the realization of all that has been decided so long ago, throws up in the pretty wildflowers, his uncle does not tell a soul.

 

 

 

 _Your old man’s wrong,_ he tells Henry the second he sees him again. They stand tiredly in the overgrown field as soldiers line up for soup, unspeaking, swords blooded and world washed golden under sinking sun, eyes older than before. Hans covers the craters in the blacksmith’s metal breast with both of his hands, as though there is godly color to hold in. He says: _We are going to live forever._

 

 

On this skyless night he cannot tell between spring and summer, when rain threatens the daisy fields and somnambulant clouds rob them of the full moon, Henry sneaks to his tent to tell Hans his plan. He is full of grave urgency unbefitting a peasant. He stands there and lets Hans undress him, hands at his sides, speaking vengeance. He says that Istvan Toth has his father’s sword—he does not specify which father—and when Talmberg is breached, he will take it back through theft or force. He does not overmuch trouble himself with the small obstacle of Sir Istvan. _That sword,_ he swears, time and time again and then some, _belongs with me._

"To you?" Hans asks, certain, muzzily drunk on red wine for the first time in too long. It makes him heavy-tongued and gentle. He should not have, but the bloody evening is coloring all of his thoughts, and if he’s to fight again, he must sleep. Alas, the killing field atop Siege Hill is not washed from his mind; it is merely waterlogged; it is a confusion of boar tusk and human skull muddy enough to let him feel like he might rest. Later, later—if there is a later—now everything is muted under the moonblood of drink, and he passes the frogs of Hal’s gambeson neatly through their loops with care that is uncommon to him.

No, Henry admits. "But with me, all the same."

"And what will you do with it, when it’s yours?" He bends knee to study the dreadful possibility of those mace teeth, something he has done more than once, but after the day’s fighting feels he must-again. Sloppy palms roam to reassure themselves that the skin is clean and whole— _Sigismund_ and _Prague_ , Henry is saying—Hans means to listen, but thinks instead of how Hal’s fingers will feel in his hair. It is cold on the ground through the braided rugs. He wraps his arms around Henry’s middle and presses his cheek deep into the unpunctured belly there, clinging foolishly, sleepy with liquor and relief. He tries to soak the earth’s chill into his blood by nearness. So the blacksmith, too.

 _"_ Carry it. However long. Until I find Markvart von Aulitz," he vows, clenching fists, but does not resist when Hans unfurls and places them upon his head. The lanternlight draws tall storybook silhouettes of them across white canvas. It makes their eyes look pupilless and their souls dark. "And I’ll kill him with it."

"That’s a fucking stupid idea," Hans tells him, softly.

"Probably." He pets. "But it’s what I plan to do."

 _Then I’ll help you,_ Hans promises—for he finds it easy, too, to promise Henry, even as he is less than sure how or when or if he can, whether or not his future will allow it.  He finds Hal’s lowest ribs somewhere in the flickering and noise of black crickets as they die slowly in wet grass outside. _Or what good am I for?_

It is not difficult. On the contrary, it is quite easy, and perhaps ease is the genesis of his problems. They are tired from combat and their bodies are sore; ease, then, to consign bonelessly to the lord’s warcamp bed and press each other’s muscle until it either feels better or worse. It is easy to sit up on his knees and push the heels of his palms into the narrow of Henry’s back, until Hal is wincing with unburdened pain and curling his hips discreetly into the pallet. Easy, to roll his hose down just enough and to lay his own frame over him, to cover his mouth with a kind and loving hand, to kiss his ear and temple and chin and take him steadily until he crumbles messily into the bedclothes. Easy to know when he, too, has finished, though he cannot recall it seconds afterward, unable in this weird season to focus on himself, certain only of his deliverance. Easy to tuck his face into Hal’s spine until he cannot see anything and squeeze him too tightly for too long, feeling his own needy heart lean forward against the wall of bone, until heat and dehydration convince Hans to disentangle. He is already quite drunk, which makes it easier to cool himself with a sip of bitter-sweet wine straight from the pitcher, then feed the rest to Henry. Which makes it easier to persuade him to fall asleep here, right where he is ensconced in the candled stillness of this tent, in this soft-enough bed, when he might otherwise be out— _out there_ , Hans gestures, walking in the cold grass of the cricketing night with less-lucky soldiers, burrowing into an itchy blanket on the ground. Easy to tell when he has lost consciousness in a matter of instants. Easy to lie beside him in the windless dim-dark, lush and poisoned by drink as by love, heavy-eyed in the dream-gauze of the comfortably sick. Easiest of all: to go away, for a while.

The tragedy, of course, about running off into the woods is that you must too return from them. Hans does not remember closing his eyes, but opens them suddenly to the cursing of the bear and the scramble of legs untangling. Uncle is wroth and red-faced and the tent flap looks like torn whale skin behind him—or how Hans imagines the death of a whale, the disruption of dream. It is at once uninspiring and macabre. He wrenches up, naked, feeling frightened and drunker.

In his scorn—which is unsurprised, but no less disappointed—Uncle pays them the most threadbare courtesy. He turns a cheek only long enough for Henry, deer-eyed with his poor heart suffering like a bumblebee in a storm, to fall out of the bed and struggle into his clothes. It would be up _roar_ iously funny, watching him hop in bare-assed panic to navigate his hose while old Hanush brays hailstone and hellfire, were they at the riverside instead of here. But they _are_ here, alas, and too-brief sleep has made Hans’s mind slower than it was before. He cannot seem to find his own clothing. He drops both feet over the mattress edge, seeking the cold shock of floor, and pulls the quilt over the worst of his nakedness.

Uncle whirls back around on them, frothing with language, most of which is lost upon Hans. He looks like a dragon under the coarse pepper-black of his beard. They are lucky it is only Hanush, but it does not feel that way in the moment.

 _“—out of your fucking mind,”_ Hans catches, seeing this happen around him. He is boiling for another drink and desperately hot despite the cool air, but does not dare reach for the empty pitcher. He tries unsuccessfully to remember the first half of his uncle’s sentence. He frowns to discourage the doubling. “At the foot of Divish’s castle, while his wife sleeps next to a pile of corpses,” Hanush snarls. _“_ While dead boys like you rot out their eyes in the fucking bailey, feeding the fucking pigs?”

Somehow, his mouth is already open. “That’s all right—they didn’t see,” the naked young lord says; oh, dismay; he really does. “The animals ate their eyes.”

Hanush slaps his left cheek with a fat palm, then his right with stout knuckles, and Hans is too drunk on dark wine to dodge. He feels only the impact. He cannot be touched by the sting.

“What in the virgin-loving fuck is wrong with you,” Uncle says, as Uncle does.

“I’m drunk,” Hans answers prettily, tongue swollen and slack in his loose mouth. Hanush hits him another time, and his cheeks must be strawberry red.

The blacksmith tries to answer, then—tries his best and meekest from the corner, scruffy with bed-hair and misbuckled gambeson, standing upright as one ought to for nobility—and Uncle smacks Henry, too, albeit not as hard. He isn’t used to it. His eyes scrunch and his body skitters in low-dog fear, and he looks like he might cry. Hans feels badly for him. Hal really didn’t deserve that, he’s sure, though in the glassball haze of liquor and spring night dew, Hans cannot remember just what it is they are being upbraided for.

Oh, well. He knows he has done something to earn his licks, at one point and always. He knows the inside of his heart is overgrown grapeskin and tree leaves.

A bastard-brat is too lowly to bother overmuch with. Hanush—who has taken a grudging liking to Hal, or at least has taken an unenthused sort of pity—merely grumbles, “Get the fuck out of here, Henry.”

Poor blacksmith! Hal hurries away, ducking tail-tucked and shoulders-hunched from the tent, carrying his boots in his hands. Hans doesn’t begrudge him the inglorious retreat. If he could, he would escape into the night, too.

When they are alone in the barely-surviving light of the oil lanterns, he is sure Uncle will hit him. He feels indignant and ready for the slap—ready to make a stand he will not entirely remember—ready to proclaim, _“You can’t strike me like that. Like I’m a child. I am the lord of fucking Rattay! I am a man!”_ (Where he knows he will be summarily struck again.) But it isn’t so. Hanush rests that heavy hand with its signet ring and punishing thumb. He curses his nephew into his clothes and pulls him mercilessly out into the night by his long arm.

Hans is unable to complain. His drunkenness unthreads quickly, but confusion owns his brow like a little boy’s. The damp grass squeaks under his heels and he stumbles leaden-tongued behind his uncle, breathing open-mouthed, needing to shiver but unable, too, to feel so cold.

He does not know where Hanush is taking him. He does not even know what camp he is in—not rightaway, being dragged along under soupy constellations and the bugs that thrive in nighttime—not until they have stopped.

 _Look here!_ Uncle threatens, in that suffocating way fathers ought to threaten, if they care. He thrusts his finger toward a suffering firepit in the field beyond them. _You take a good look, boy. Tell me what you think you see._

He does. There, propped beside the flame like a gamebird waiting for an oven, is Toth’s man, stripped and tied to the foot of their trebuchet. He is slumped on a broken leg and bleeding in the wretched half-sleep of having been shaken deep inside himself. He twitches awake at the passing of boots, scrambling on his wrecked leg and promptly screaming, forgetting in instants what has happened to him. The soldiers at the east hill snort and laugh, but do not mind him or his terror. There is sad red frothing. Someone has smashed a jar of lantern oil ruinously upside his face. Its pieces twinkle like a riven star in the dirt.

 _It isn’t,_ Hans stammers, voice cracking weak and mighty in offense, seeing only himself in a world of might-have-beens with dogs killed at his feet and his back strung to a Cuman spear. _It isn’t the same. It would not happen to me._

 _You?_ Hanush dares him—and in the centre of his wild heart, some fragile green leaf falls.

 _That’s going to be Henry one day,_ he says, pointing, grabbing Hans’s chin when he tries to peevishly turn his head away, forcing him to look at the glass and the blood and the broken front teeth, _if you never fucking learn to grow up._

There is no way to tell on this dark night if the blood on the bandit's face has a brother, somewhere, praying to be spared. Dogs bark in the moonless woods, lost from each other. Erik spits his teeth into the soft meadow grass.

Autumn hangs on the edge of summer. Spring will not last forever. Everything, only for a while.

 

 

 

In springtime, the weather breaks suddenly, and blood, too. Young Sir Hans is shot in the night. He feels the absurdity of the arrow in his buttock more than he feels the pain.

He is much too hot when he awakes. Hans does not remember being not-awake. He doesn't remember the precise point at which Hal dragged him back to and passed him over the Talmberg ramparts, nor does he recall the slip of his mind when Captain Robard pulled the shaft. (Captain Bernard had insisted on doing it, to spare him the embarrassment if nothing else—but at his young master’s first scream, Captain Bernard could no longer seem to muster the necessary callous.) He remembers mostly the animal smell of the bailey yard, and fearing they might find an eyeless pile of dead boys’ skulls.

Divish is neither pleased nor surprised that their last attempt at sparing his castle’s walls has floundered. He notes the scouts’ return with grim resignation to the coming battle. He does not worry much over young Lord Capon with the arrow in his flank, or seem particularly thrilled by the handful of servants his stricken Lordship elected to smuggle out. He would have rather had his wife.

Hans is lucky, as he often is. The arrowhead burrows short of the bone, and comes free with pliers and a good yank. Robard, who would well know, even supposes he might fight come the inevitable charge. It is all talk wasted upon Lord Capon, though; his mind is slippery paint stirred up by rum, and when he wakes again, the cot beneath him is sticky with sweat that smells of medicine and charcoal.

“Get this off me,” Hans demands, frustrated in his confusion, kicking at the blankets. He cannot see much beyond the grainy light of his bedside candles, but strains to look down upon himself. It is difficult to roust above this thick water of drug-sleep. He remembers too well what this sort of drunkenness is like and feels a spike of anger—of injustice, of _it isn't my fault!—_ catch in the maze of his insides. He cannot quite think. “Didn’t I get shot? I don’t feel shot.”

Henry’s hand pulls the twisted quilt back over his hips as rejected furs thump on the floor. “I suspect you don’t feel much of anything, with all the spirits Robard poured down you. Screaming like a strangled rooster, you were. Toth probably thinks we’re summoning demons.”

And though it vexes him, Lord Capon here sees no other choice. He relaxes his shoulders all at once and lets the air whoosh from his lungs, the base of his skull strike mattress. The drunk-darkness spins around him with fire and dull throbbing and sleep. It infuriates him. At Robard, and at Bernard, and at Divish, and at himself. He does not want to ever be like this again. He feels as though he is a boy of eight, sick and silly and slow in his bed as his sister wastes away and the whole world molts onward, leaving spring for weather cooler and stouter in heart. But he does not want to be a boy—not anymore—not by drink or by dreams or by hiding his face beneath a crown of deer bone, in fantasy he can make-believe escape. His own heart grows too heavy with the woods and the sound of church bells. He would like the power to change some things, somehow.

“Henry,” Hans pleads—not frightened, but stern with the newness of what turns inside his head—and catches Hal’s arm without knowing whether or when he will leave. “Don’t go anywhere, will you.”

“Don’t be a babe,” Henry scoffs, patting in one side of the cover so that his shot lord does not lie there naked as a jay. “It’s just a flesh wound. I got nailed twice-worse than that the last time I ran through Talmberg.”

Hans wishes he could better see through this fog, but he knows already the depth of Hal’s brow and dark of his lashes and the wet grain color and cut of his hair. “No,” he insists. “I want you to stay. In Rattay. Divish and Robard and whoever else can go wander the hills.”

“I don’t know where I’ll be sent after all this nonsense.”

“Swear to my service. You can live in Pirkstein—I’ll give you a room—a real room,” Hans babbles, eyes going bright and stupid, wheeling too fast for himself now, “in the castle. You can marry your millmaid, too; I don’t care about it anymore. When the king confirms me, I’ll send Hanush back to Uzhitz, and I’ll knight you.”

Henry is already shaking his head, Hans can tell; he sits carelessly on the cot, making it lopsided; he is rolling his eyes with the ridiculousness of it, and of him, as though he does not understand how sincerely Hans means his ridiculousness. “I can’t swear to your service, you dolt! I’m already sworn to Sir Radzig.”

“Fuck Sir Radzig!”

“He _is_ my father.”

“Oh, fuck your father, Hal! He didn’t want you,” he says, swearing it in the same way you must pull a stitch that has ached in the meat for too long; a truth like a skillet burn; brow furrowing with a pain he cannot tell between righteous anger for Hal’s sake and something older, for himself. He means it, too. He means, “I always wanted you. Since I knew you well enough to want you, and even before that, a little. He can go to Hell,” Hans figures, slurring. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

Henry reacts immediately. The wide-open face cringes like the dog who has been hit once and expects forever to be hit again. “You don’t know about it,” he protests, ready for none of it and furious to be so recklessly dismantled. Hans sits up on his unshot hip to grab half-blindly for Hal’s hands, fumbling until he finds them; Henry tries to pull them away, angry to have his wound opened like that to cold air; but Hans holds on.

“I do, believe me. About nothing else. But about this, I know.”

Henry stands, taking his chilly hands with him. Hans tries to look as earnest as he can with unwanted liquor swimming inside his brain. Hal fumes, looking as though he might punch his jaw, were the young lord not already abed with a wound. As you look when you have been ambushed in the woods. As you look when you have been wronged terribly in a place you thought was safe.

"You don’t," he swears. He says, "What do you know about me?"

 _Enough_ , Hans starts, but doesn’t finish, because it’s not true. He says, instead, _Some of it_.

Henry bites his teeth together for the burden of biting back too long. Outloud, fists clenching and releasing, apple bobbing on anger, he seethes, “Like who? Like you know Klara? Like Karolina. You don’t know anyone—just what you want us to be. For you! What do you know,” Hal demands; his green eyes bend and blaze the light in this tent.  _Don’t you know,_ he trembles, not with his voice but with his tight shoulders and the gravelly swallow moving down his throat, _that this will kill me?_ “That I can follow you about in the woods?” he squawks aloud instead, arm swinging, unraveling like a string in wind. “That you can tell me how to do things, and I’ll do them? You know what _you_ told me. You don’t know about me.”

"I would," Hans protests, honest and small, though it marginally kills him—"I would, if you’d tell me."

Truth, too. The blacksmith’s boy cannot look up anymore. He forces down the nail caught against his tongue. “I can’t.”

“And so I never asked.”

Henry sits heavily back down. His embers have burnt up quickly and left him. Lord Capon thinks of the millmaid in the snow.

“I’m not your brother, you fool,” he tells Hans, sorry for it, and for him, and for his own self, too. “You’re just lonely.”

Hans is not convinced, or such a disavowal would have hurt him much worse. He does not whine or cloy or order-about. He does not even aim to provoke. Instead, he stumbles for sobriety in the night, and without his clothes, he tells him. He tells Henry _You don’t know a thing about loneliness_. He tells him it is not the same hurt to wake one day having lost to a fire all the people in this world who love you as it is to wake every day knowing the people who should have loved you do not. He tells him there were three other sisters—all dead in the womb, before they were even real sisters. He tells him that, the moment she died, no one so much as spoke of Gisela anymore; no one put a flower on a gravestone; no one wrote down her name. He tells him that his mother blamed God, but that Jan Ješek, Lord of Rattay, blamed him. He tells him that his father was a bitter, paranoid old man—one who accused his only son of ruining his wife—one who had not spoken to Hans a hundred times in his life—yet still a bitter old man who could have no other legacy but this. He tells him that it would have taken only a single brother to depose him from this awful throne. He tells him that it is the indifference that does it, when you get past the fanfare of being uncared-for. He tells him about coldness worse than cruelty. He tells him that, if his sins were few at first, he made sure they were soon many. He became what his father deserved.

It is not asking—not quite. But Yours-for-Mine is a rule of brothers. And so, looking upon his own hands where they rest emptily upon his lap, Henry tells Hans something, too. _Something about you-before,_ seeks the young lord, birdlike beneath his bandages and blanket, _that nobody else knows._

He tells him of his lost love’s dog. She would carry that pup around, he tells him, like it was a swaddled baby, feeding it dinner scraps and tickling its toes. She was only a girl then, Bianca, and so Henry only a boy. But alas, dogs die long before little girls and boys do. He tells him how she wailed as her father dug a grave in his vegetable yard; how Theresa held her hands on the innhouse steps as they watched; how young Henry didn’t know what to think or do or say, knowing only that he would have done near anything to have her grow up and love him half as much as she loved that floppy-eared spaniel. He tells him that everyone who loved at all loved Bianca, in one way or the next. He tells him how, in the weest purple-dark of morning, hands burning with shame, the blacksmith’s boy from Silver Skalitz took up with a spade one fine white dogbone. He tells him how he carved a lucky charm, like a witch in a fairy story, lovers’ dice. He tells him how he consulted his magic die for years in their courtship and maybe-courtship and nearly-courtship. He tells him how it picked the place they first danced and kissed and where he would ask her to marry him. He tells him, bleary with sadness and anger he cannot yet fully understand in his fire-wrought dullness, how in making this tool of fate, he must have cursed himself to be hated by dogs forever—how they must smell their sister’s desecrated marrow under his fingernails and on his soul and know he is their Enemy. He tells him where the sigil is hidden, under the plank of a house he cannot enter again, a room full of ash and melted ghosts. He tells him he deserves their teeth and howling. He tells him how the lost dogs have now eaten his poor love’s bones.

 _You see,_ Hans echoes, softly—for good follows after badness. For even if he is become a lawful lord, he was always once a prince of the forest, too. _"So brothers, we. In as much as two vultures are."_

Outside, the stars are whole over Talmberg. Tonight, all the wild dogs can find their way home.

 

* * *

 

They shake Istvan from the bleeding tower. Divish trades his enemy’s man for his wife’s freedom, and with Radzig tied ‘round the waist like a Christmas goose, they gallop up the north road, slinging dirt and clanking with treasures they stole. They’ve got Hal’s sword, too.

Lord Capon gives chase. He runs down the stone stairs and swings onto his horse, and he is away with the blacksmith like hunters after black foxes. It is a painfully sunny summer, and their armor burns. Hans is certain his destrier could outpace the Hungarians, but this is a pursuit he has been warned not to win— _"Toth will gut you like a dog and won’t break a fucking sweat_ , _"_ Hanush thunders, _"if you catch him."_ And besides, he would most certainly lose Henry, too.

Radzig awaits them alone in the fallow fields beyond Skalitz, where little purple wildflowers bloom boldly, insensitive to the wreckage of men. Behind him, the black ribs of his home rise like broken oyster from a faraway sea.

They cut the orphaned lord from the ropes in which Toth left him. Henry’s hands quake as he slides the flat of his skinning knife beneath the ties on his father’s wrists. Hans sees sweat darken the fine hair at the back of his neck and feels a bit like a flight animal, too. From this distance, the sky is flawless blue and the air smells of dry October grass peppered with faint cinder, as if someone burned a woodfire for their dinner last night. Hal breathes it in tiny, fledgling breaths, like he in his plate is a soldier toy of straw legs and glass lungs. Hans prickles to comfort. But does not—for he knows, now. He sees the skeleton of the silver mines and the hollowed-out redbrick belltower, the collapsed chimney of the mill. He knows a hand between his brother’s shoulders would only cause him to break.

It is difficult to tell with Radzig when he is being genuine or when coy—his is that ponderous Socrates of a demeanor, a stoic _hmm_ for every situation—but nevertheless, he thanks them both. Lord Capon regards the lord who lives in his castle thinly. But he does not aim to be in the way, and so resumes his foxhunt, leaving Hal with his father in the shadow of Skalitz to do as each thinks he deserves.

 _Will you go back?_ Hans had asked as they rode north at a canter over the bridge and below the trees.

No, Henry told him.

_Not someday?_

Never, he vowed. Not even to visit. Not even to lay his two hands upon the cross over the blacksmith’s grave.

 

 

 

The chase is vanity. Sir Istvan escapes into the woods and over the border. Young Lord Capon leaves them to the mercy of forest, and turns his horse back toward home.

Home in measure. First, he stops at the silver hills, and walks the charred road to Skalitz, instead.

There is no wall to keep him out. Hans steers the red stallion with firm heels and a calm, steady heart. The dead buildings slump into ash with their spines showing, and to breathe becomes so difficult—even now, after time—Lord Capon chokes. He covers his muzzle with the crook of an elbow. He leans over in the saddle to spit out sour foam. It is not flesh, this smell of old devastation. It is a confusion of living and dying like smelling a scream, evil smoke seeped into soil and sweet grass and burnt linen and lime trees, rotting squashes and hooves and the thickness of flies. It makes him gag and his eyes weep of their own accord. But sinew and ember and shit and brambles, he must see it. If he is to be a brother. And so a lord, too.

He steadies his horse when it trembles. He forces the rocky taste of knives and his fear of men in silver masks back down his throat, and he blinks until the weakness in him runs clear.

The path up castle hill is in shambles. Hans dismounts in the overgrown green, which is littered with workhorse bones, and leads his frightened animal on foot past the remains of its simpler cousins. They climb that way, good following bad, treading gently across ground hallowed by the bodies of creatures that did not deserve to die for the ambitions of more complicated men.

This is what he must do, if he will ever understand.

The blacksmith’s house is still standing. Looters have crumbled the forge, and rusted tools are scattered ‘cross the yard and garden’s shriveled grapes. But the gutted cottage holds against what has been thrown against it. Hans steps carefully upon the swaybacked porch, leaving his horse fastened to a sapling so it does not abandon him. It looks, he thinks, like the belly of a little ship cast astray in cruel ocean; salt has made its edges leak the outside in; he can imagine no one ever living there, not anymore.

Three rooms had the blacksmith’s family, though it is difficult to suppose what was once where. Sigismund’s soldiers have long ago eaten the pantry bare and turned furniture upside-down; there are signs of rats, too. Dandelions grow from cracks in the walls, and through glassless windows, sparrows have built their nests indoors. He finds the loosest board in the sparsest corner and pulls it up with his hands.

It’s a little red thing, Hal’s talisman. Whittled dog-ivory, painted as a heart is and worn from being rolled in barn lofts and fields and tavern rooms. It seems such a tiny vessel for a curse, and for love, too. He finds it wrapped in suede, just as described, and the die tumbles softly into his open palm.

Birds quarrel outside in the linden tree. Hans slips the die tightly into his fist and rests the lifted floor.

He has seen the world, then. He has seen with his own eyes and breathed with his own mouth the bloodprice paid for the badness of lords, and the souls, like flowers, that will never grow completely back. He sees Henry there, lighter than sunlight, almost hard to recognize by the keenness in his face and fire to his guts, different yet at once just the same. He sees him kicking rocks up the road with his terrible friends, not yet bandits, their necks yet unhung. He sees the inn stoop where sweet Bianca cradled her lady-dog, feeding it strips of jerky and fishcakes. He sees a younger Feyfar pestering a younger Radzig with figures and numbers and papers. He sees children who will not grow up wrestle under shop awnings. He sees the blacksmith and the blacksmith’s wife meeting beneath their old tree between labors to snicker and kiss like spring lovers. He sees the millmaid in her millyard, with kittens winding around her feet and a bundle of apple blossoms in her arms.

He knows, then, who he must be.

It will go dark before long. He knows of no more secrets to salvage, and so—with the relic pressed in his fingers—Lord Capon leaves apple flowers at the cross on the blacksmith’s grave.

He returns to his castle. In the green willows of Rattay, it is beginning to feel like fall.

 

* * *

 

Henry weeps when Hans returns his curséd die. He intends not to, but it takes him by surprise—the artifact and the tears, too. He could not have done anything else. He sits flimsily on the grass in the hunting camp, holding his old hope in his hand, and cries into his fists among shedding maples. A hard scale drops off him, exposing a raw untempered bone.

Distraction is easy. In a moment, or for a while. For a lifetime, perhaps, if there is much behind you or ahead to be so desperately forgotten. You can dull yourself in fire or drown in chasing things you cannot have. You can run into the darkest trees and forge a monstrous crown. You can drink yourself into a child. You can like until you love. But one cannot rule the woods forever lest they leave an organ of themselves behind. We are not meant for anything, forever—if you live a life of truth and beauty, everything is only for its time.

Hans tells him as much. He swears he does not mind if Henry cries. He reminds him of his father’s sight of good and evil. He reminds him he is not unwanted, not without family. He tells him he can bury his curse on the bluffs of Rattay or hurl it into the river, as he pleases, as he thinks will help. He pledges that what happened there will not happen here, ever—he will not risk it, no matter what or whom he must give up—not for silver or wine or any shape of crown. He tells him the sparrows debate in his mother’s garden and over his parents’ grave. He tells him he knows the work of running, too.

He tells him all of this and more, but none of it stops Henry’s crying. Hans sits on the earth beside him, feeling a new season in his lungs, and like brothers, leans his body close. They stay in the woods all night.

The stars have no maps for when things will happen. He cries and cries until morning, when the sunlight bleeds open across the deer fields, the green cedes gently to autumn, and fresh air makes it easy for Henry to sleep.

Bones belong to the springtime. But not to it, only.  

**Author's Note:**

>  **Nerd Note** : We love him as buckwild firebrand Hans Capon in KCD, but historically, Jan Ptáček was not a remarkable lord. His disinterested participation in the ensuing Hussite wars even suggests dude must've kicked out/it. But that's, like, a bummer, so I'm waving a historical fiction license and postulating that he merely learned to prioritize the safety of his own commonfolk thanks to a few key personal influences. ;)


End file.
